the merciless wheels of democracy

In case you are still wondering why exactly Minister of Interior, Ziad Baroud’s proposal for pre-printed ballots was vehemently opposed byAmal, Hizballah, the Lebanese Forces, and the Future Movement:

What happens is that the campaign machines themselves print a list of candidates that they want you to put in the ballot box, and distribute it. That sounds harmless, but it’s the key device to track votes. Most people vote in villages, where you have rarely more than 2,000 voters, who are further subdivided by sect and by family register numbers. So if in a given voting room you have ten major families, they will distribute ten different versions of the same list to those families — different in font, name order, etc. During vote count, the election monitors of the various candidates inspect any single ballot paper, and they track exactly how many copies of what version ended up in the box. And after the elections, they may come to the head of that family and tell him: hey — we promised you to pay the tuition for your nephew, we settled your cousin’s hospital bill — why didn’t you guys vote for us?

There is another ingenious device to insure people vote the way they are supposed to or paid to: the “rent-an-ID” method. Basically, you are paid a certain sum of money in return for giving up your national identity card until election day. Then, on the appointed day, you are met by a representative who hands you your ID and a ballot, making sure you drop the latter “as is” (mitil/zayy ma hiyyi).